Usenet Newsgroups have been great over the past almost twenty years for me. I am finding less and less good posting and always more and more spamming. I fear that we are witnessing the death-rattle of the terminally. The problem is not Usenet newsgroups. Thousands of them are thriving quite nicely today just as they have for decades. The problem is that people do not seem to use them as much as earlier and more spam coming to them.
I still find all the web-based forums to be too primitive. Too often the problems are both user interface and the content (too many forums and too few really good and active). No web-based forum holds a candle to real Usenet. If you only know Usenet through a web-based interface like Google Groups, then you don’t really know Usenet. All web-based forums are dramatically inferior to Usenet.
Likely many of us also use web-based forums for certain specialty topics, particularly forums that are chartered for the discussion of certain hardware and or software, etc. But the Usenet newsgroups continue to be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than any web-based forum I have seen in 20 years.
Web-based forums are generally HORRID. I avoid them unless absolutely necessary. If you have never used a real Usenet newsreader client and a proper Usenet NNTP server, then you are in no position to judge what is happening to this or any other Usenet newsgroup.
